Do I NEED to be on Twitter?

This is a very common question that has an interesting answer, which is no. I say no because unless your brand has content that falls into a breaking news or live event space, the Twitter ecosystem can be very daunting to break through on. Twitter is a platform that has had some of the least innovation since launch and as a platform is a fire hose of content blasting at the user at a rate of over 500 million tweets per day. To add context, if this were email you would be getting an email from nearly 20% of the people in the United States, every, single, day.

So how does a brand excel at Twitter?

By connecting.

This is the other thing that brands find discouraging because Twitter is not a place where you should push out content all day. Where Twitter is brilliant is that it is still the place where people come to talk about what is going on RIGHT NOW. So, as a brand, we need to leap into these conversations where it makes sense and interact with our customers, because that is what they have come to expect. Customers are looking to brands on social that understand the language of the medium they are using and in turn reward those that engage with them with their time and interest. If you are a brand that is very adept at this, you can turn that time and interest into advocacy and look to those brand advocates to help scale your story.

The trick with Twitter isn’t so much the 140 characters; it is trying to scale 1-on-1 conversations. Brands that have the ability to talk to customers as if they were the only person in the room have an unfair advantage on a platform like Twitter. If you are looking for some great examples, check out @Tacobell and @therealPSL. Both accounts (while both in the QSR space) do a tremendous job at speaking to the customer instead of at them. In fact in 2014 the Starbucks account @TheRealPSL was attributed to a 21% increase in sales of the Pumpkin Spice Latte and of the 10,000 tweets that account sent that year nearly 70% of them were mentions of customers and not brand messaging.